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Re: [NANOG] Multihoming for small frys?


From: Sean Figgins <sean () labrats us>
Date: Wed, 21 May 2008 14:29:28 -0600

William Herrin wrote:

I have a client who needs to multihome with multiple vendors for
reliability purposes, currently in the Northern Virginia area and
later on with a fail-over site, probably in Hawaii. They have only a
very modest need for bandwidth and addresses (think: T1's and a few
dozen servers) but they have to have BGP multihoming and can afford to
pay for it.

Now, I have a question about this... Is the customer using the sites for redundancy, and will have both upstream providers in each site?

Honestly, a small operation like this may be better served by multiple connections to the same provider. Such a setup can usually be done to multiple routers, through redundant circuit paths, and done at substantially less cost that two different providers. And, in my experience, using one provider can often be more reliable than multiple providers, given how many providers transport facilities ride the same fiber path, and sometimes the same bundle.

 -Sean


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